Relationships are tricky. Sometimes you just have to take off. Maybe on a medieval pilgrimage, or to a ballroom in eighteenth-century London, or perhaps a hotel in Eastbourne where the sheets are made of plastic. But you can never really escape. Via nightingales, betting shops, horny marriage counsellors and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, this pamphlet looks at different kinds of intimacy – with lovers, grandmothers, patriarchy, the not-yet- born – and what they can reveal about sex, power and care.